Stig Dagerman: Island of the Doomed

Dawn. Lucas Egmont, lying prostrate in the sand, his wounded leg with its pierced calf raised in a slight curve like a long bridge, sloping gently down on each side, was woken slowly by the grey, bitter-sharp streaks brushing his eyelids. His eyes cowered in terror under their trembling lids as he watched his hand coming crawling towards him over the sand. A swollen, toad-like creature with bleeding limbs. ‘Go away!’ he wanted to scream, ‘Leave me alone!’ — but the creature merely dug holes in the ground, from which dazzling white strands of smoke, as thin as copper wire, rose skywards.

Note his predicament: he wanted to scream but found it impossible: his swollen tongue lay like a large, quivering, clenched fist in his mouth. When they’d run aground, the metal kegs of fresh water had been hurled overboard and split open against the sharp reef. Now they were lying there like seals halfway out of the water on the seaward side of the reef, and the slow swell, detaching itself from the horizon in an endless series of blue pulses, drummed all day long with its soft knuckles on their gleaming metal shoulders.

At least they had some music, then. The muffled, hollow roll of funeral drums droned on relentlessly, penetrating the swishing sighs of the surf, and as the island plunged through the scorching expanses of fiery yellow, Lucas Egmont could feel fine, live electric wires linking his auditory nerves to the restless throbbing from the reef. He tried to tear himself away from the agonizing noise by fleeing to the interior of the island, but the wires trailed behind him over grinding, bone-dry sand, squelching shallows, sharp-toothed pinnacles of rock, in whose shadows huge brown lizards, iguanas, lurked. Their noisy thudding pursued him through the dense, green, hissing scrub, pregnant with mysterious silence, into shoulder-high grass crowned with large, frightening panicles and filled with mysterious little sounds; from snakes, perhaps, or some of those little rabbits hungry Tim Solider claimed to have glimpsed at the edge of the island’s undergrowth.

The run set his heart pounding, the wound in his calf opened up, and at last, exhausted by the loss of blood and the terror ripping him apart, he came up on to the open, weather-worn rocks looming high above the thin strip of sand which encircled the island like a frieze. There was usually one of the others wandering about up there, peering down into the lagoon for edible fish, gazing into the distance in the all too vain hope of seeing another, more amenable and more communicative island bobbing up and down against the horizon. ‘Mr Egmont, Mr Egmont!’ they would cry those first few days when the meat was still appetizing and healthily red in the red provision boxes that had floated ashore. ‘Mr Egmont, let me help you! Your leg. .’

Couldn’t they hear the incessant drumming from the reef, throbbing away in his head through these fiendishly designed, elastic wires, no matter where he went?

Ah well! As he lay here, he wondered if it might be a dream after all. Could it really be true that these almost paralysed legs he couldn’t prevent from trembling, their flesh swelling up and gradually turning blue — God, if only he had a knife — had carried him over the steep slope of the island, past these people wandering about without understanding the seriousness of his predicament, never mind their own? He’d have loved to prise open their jaws and convince himself once and for all that their tongues were just as much like grotesque, bloated, slimy lumps of sand as his own. Right to the very end, indeed, as long as there was one last drop of water left, if their legs would still carry them, they’d be scuttling around on the high ground as carefree as butterfly-hunters, sleeping through the dawn even though every change of light brought them ever closer to the bottom of the world.

Aaah! Without his being able to move a limb to prevent it, a whole series of groans, cadences with neither beginning nor end, suddenly started shooting through him, thumping at his diaphragm, rasping against his chest, burning into his throat, forcing their way like daggers past his tongue. Where were they going? Suddenly a noise spilled out all around him, seeming to transport him, to raise him up, to envelop him on all sides like water, running into his ears, hot and stimulating like steam from a bath; undercurrents carried him slowly through widening channels, and his body rotated slowly in response to their slightest movements, as if on a swivel; all the time, his skin could feel the gentle, gloved pressure from the noise, which was now becoming more intense; persistent, groping fingers stretched his skin until it shimmered like a transparent membrane in the penetrating green light of the water, his nerves coiled themselves painfully around three of those cruel fingers, and then sank down into fast-flowing, bitingly cold water: it was like being skinned alive until nothing remained but the sensitive core of his being — and then he woke up and found himself on the usual little meadow of his thirst-dream:

Grass, the grass of childhood with its soft, seed-laden tips, his pony Pontiac loping over the meadow, the grass whispering past its haunches; the saddle had come loose and was thumping, thumping against its shoe-polished black flanks. Racing over the long, green grass and flinging his arms round the neck of the dancing animal with a shriek of suddenly felt pain and incipient happiness. A damp muzzle imprinting itself on his nape, his bare neck, his hot brow, being forced gently down into the warm grass of summer. For it’s always summer in this dream, with its big, white butterfly fluttering hither and thither around his summery head. Up in the saddle now, kicking against Pontiac’s belly, the trees in the park dripping sun-drops, and look! That cricket ball Uncle Jim hit into the mists the other evening, there it is by the roots of that oak tree — but why not, let it stay there! Pontiac’s panting now, its black hide’s stretching tighter and tighter over its heart, lungs, nerves, but the boy in the red cap on its back is still urging it on with the heels of his shoes. Now Pontiac’s galloping down the middle of the path in the big park, dust rising around its hooves; the tracks made by the caleche meander first one way, then the other, and as they career round a bend, it suddenly collapses on to its knees and its head thuds dully into the sand.

The gardener’s children appear immediately from their hiding place behind the oak tree; they stand looking in silence, just looking in silence, at the horse and rider. A boy and a girl, their incongruously long arms hanging down like unemployed pendulum cords; their four eyes are like membranes stretched over their hatred, their clothes are scruffy and too often washed and, with some difficulty, Lucas Egmont recognizes them from the distant past as having once been his own. Neither of them steps forward, they just stand there in silence, looking at the rider and the dead horse; the four legs of the dead horse are still now, no longer twitching, and the dust slowly settles, forming a powdery film on the horse’s hindquarters, which are still glowing with the sweat it exuded when it was still alive. Everything is still now, and the shadows cast by the oak suddenly become sharp black cavities chiselled into the road; the soughing of the leaves fades away, and beyond the park, the windmill with the damaged sail that can always be heard precisely because it’s damaged, falls silent; the narrow, white path is behind him and in front of him, and beside him is Pontiac, the dead horse. The breathing of the gardener’s children has overshadowed the world, the great park is veiled in lace and the clouds of the summery blue sky, even the twittering of the birds filter through as Lucas Egmont stands there beside the dead horse.